I had completely forgotten Rich and Sara's stunt from this arc. It's odd, because this arc dominates my memories of No Exit.

Cyndi and Charlotte, this was such an odd turn. It would almost have been less dark to watch Charlotte dump her lifeless body into a shallow grave.

As I made stupidly clear at the bottom of a fifth so long ago, I've never really been comfortable with writing Cyndi off as "a monster." She quietly wished for her "friends" to commit suicide - Charlotte beat her within an inch of her life with a lacrosse stick, then came within a hair's breadth of cutting her throat.

Yeah, Cyndi is hardly passive, she's deliberately pushing people to destruction. She calls it finding the hole in their self esteem, sticking her finger in and ripping it wider and wider. She gets off on the suffering of others and the more she comes to understand it the more dangerous she becomes. She lost perspective and let her enjoyment exceed her masquerade so she got caught but they didn't recognise what she was, each time they told her off she gained some perspective on what she really wanted and how to get it.

Hard to say, she was really lacking perspective, even now. Had things continued without any meddling she would have remained impulsive and small scale, wrecked her own reputation over the next couple years so absolutely nobody trusts her and likely got herself arrested when she finally went for something big as an adult. Only reason she gets as far as she does is because Penny and Aggie's group try to play high school blackmail games with her and then try to explain why she sucks, which just taught her how to become better at what she was doing and gave her targets. They should have exposed her games to everyone instead of just threatening to, simply interfered with her schemes instead of explaining why they were smarter than her.